Category: Ineffable

I saw that Force Awakens movie a while ago. I don’t know if anyone has made this observation yet, but I thought Kylo Ren was basically the personification of the whole movie: he’s a reiteration of an original product that’s neurotically obsessed with whether he’s as good as the example he’s copied from.

He’s good enough, which is kind of my feeling on the movie as a whole. I thought it was decently entertaining, though it’s kind of interesting to see the Marvel blockbuster formula being used for something other than superheroes.

I logged on to the Dragon’s Dogma website for the first time since August. Apparently one of my characters essentially won a beauty contest and was featured on the game newsletter by Capcom. On the one hand, yay me. On the other hand, that particular look is being copied by other players, judging from the screenshots being submitted.

What the hell, people? Get your own look. It took me hours to coordinate that outfit, not to mention the time I spent picking the hairstyle and fine tuning the bone structure and body type for that character. And I don’t want to think of how many goblins and bandits I had to kill for that cape.

Anyway, I’m thinking of playing this game for a third time and getting all the trophies. There are only three left and they don’t look that hard. One quick run should do it.

I bought Dark Souls 2 over the weekend, and I’ve been playing it every day since. It’s quite fun.

Among many in the video game community, the Souls games are held up as the pinnacle of difficulty, with a typical playthrough resulting in at least hundreds of deaths for the player. I don’t really see it, though. My failures are the result of my miscalculations and are essentially just part of the learning process for a new player.

I do want to share my favourite story so far, which is about the first time my game got invaded. Other players may enter your game to help or hinder you, as they wish, and one such person did so to me. I was just minding my own business when someone glowing red showed up in my game. I bowed to him, since it seemed the polite thing to do, then he bowed back, then I stepped forward to get a closer look at him and he shot me in the chest with a crossbow. I didn’t know we were supposed to be fighting. He was classy about it and messaged me saying "Valar morghulis", so of course I replied back "Valar dohaeris" since no one is outdorking me.

Anyway, I also discovered this list of player names banned from Dark Souls 2. Players may choose the names of their characters, and if you’re familiar with certain parts of the Internet then you’ve already guessed that most of the banned names involve sex acts or are various synonyms for genitals. It’s kind of awe-inspiring that so much human creativity is expended on slipping obscenities into a video game.

Okay, here’s an idea for a movie: You know how aliens came to Earth and gave us the tools and the science to build like pyramids and Stonehenges and shit? Where did all that high tech space hooey go?

Well, maybe a greedy alien developer was going to demolish their community skate park, so the Atlanteans bet everything on a breakdancing contest that was going to be broadcast live across the galaxy. Unfortunately the alien champion was too fly and – according to the ancient rules of breakdancing – all of Earth had to give up its advanced technology. All this and more in Breakin’ 3: Intergalactic Boogaloo.

What the hell is up with anime lately, anyway? The titles are basically a descriptive sentence containing a plot synopsis. I realize this isn’t really a trend from within anime, but because a lot of anime are light novel adaptations. The trend is therefore merely carried over from light novels themselves. Sample titles:

There’s no way my little sister is this cute

My youth romantic comedy is wrong as I expected

I couldn’t become a hero, so I reluctantly decided to get a job

My girlfriend and my childhood friend fight too much

Seriously, this is getting ridiculous. What if Star Wars had used the same naming convention? “I went into space and kissed my long-lost sister”?

It also seems that the crappier series are the ones that try to squeeze the entire premise into the title. The ones that pander to a ready-made audience of otaku, I mean (implied incest, flat female characters, harems, etcetera). In fact, this article states that the inherent crappiness and ephemerality of light novels – which are, quite frankly, a dime a dozen in Japan – necessitates squeezing the premise into the title to catch the eyes of bookstore customers who are confronted by shelves of stories so unoriginal that the customers can barely summon the energy to read the plot synopsis on the back of the book.

Fortunately, an insider states in the article that he believes that the trend will burn out soon. New light novels will need another way to distinguish themselves from the pack. Yay for cyclical trends in fashion?

Damn you, Mass Effect trilogy, why were you on sale on the PSN store? I’m doing nothing but playing Mass Effect 2 as soon as I get home and up to when I fall asleep with the controller in my hands. I finished the first game years ago and I quite liked it, but not enough to deal again with some of the wonky aspects that set my teeth on edge the first time around (i.e., driving the MAKO, dealing with the inventory system, the endless elevator rides, and so forth).

So to refresh my memory on the plot, I read the fanfic Of Sheep and Battle Chicken. I would have been pleased if it were the official novelization of the game, instead of the rather bad spin-off novels that were actually published. It explores and expands upon stuff from the game, and where necessary it invents things wholesale. The story also isn’t shy about changing things drastically from the game’s plot to make the narrative flow better, which I quite liked. It’s by no means perfect, since small but persistent annoyances such as mixing up “its” and “it’s” and slipping between past and present tense happen quite a bit, but they weren’t enough to stop me. The fic’s writer really poured a lot of creative juice into this endeavour, as evidenced by the reams of text about this fictional world’s setting, akin to Tolkien’s volumes full of hobbit apocrypha.

In other anime news, apparently Russia invaded the Ukraine. Did anyone else hear about this? Do you know what anime this is from? I’m guessing Axis Powers Hetalia but I’m not a hundred percent on that.

The weather this summer has been unseasonably cool in Hogtown, much like there hasn’t been anything that hot in this season of anime. And yeah, I’ve been watchingAldnoah Zero every Saturday morning, but normally I’d have more than one series occupying my viewing.

My malaise has been somewhat allayed, though, since I just saw that a new episode ofMonogatari has come out. I think I’ll let the episodes pile up a bit before plowing through them, but I’d forgotten how much I liked this show. Yay for capitalism’s demand for constant production.